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The Prison-Industrial Complex

Correctional officials see danger in prison overcrowding. Others see opportunity. The nearly two million Americans behind bars—the majority of them nonviolent offenders—mean jobs for depressed regions and windfalls for profiteers

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In the hills east of
Sacramento, California, Folsom State Prison stands beside a man-made lake,
surrounded by granite walls built by inmate laborers. The gun towers have
peaked roofs and Gothic stonework that give the prison the appearance of a
medieval fortress, ominous and forbidding. For more than a century Folsom and
San Quentin were the end of the line in California's penal system; they were
the state's only maximum-security penitentiaries. During the early 1980s, as
California's inmate population began to climb, Folsom became dangerously
overcrowded. Fights between inmates ended in stabbings six or seven times a
week. The poor sight lines within the old cellblocks put correctional officers
at enormous risk. From 1984 to 1994 California built eight new maximum-security
(Level 4) facilities. The bullet holes in the ceilings of Folsom's cellblocks,
left by warning shots, are the last traces of the prison's violent years. Today
Folsom is a medium-security (Level 2) facility, filled with the kind of inmates
that correctional officers consider "soft." No one has been stabbed to death at
Folsom in almost four years. Among its roughly 3,800 inmates are some 500
murderers, 250 child molesters, and an assortment of rapists, armed robbers,
drug dealers, burglars, and petty thieves. The cells in Housing Unit 1 are
stacked five stories high, like boxes in a vast warehouse; glimpses of hands
and arms and faces, of flickering TV screens, are visible between the steel
bars. Folsom now houses almost twice as many inmates as it was designed to
hold. The machine shop at the prison, run by inmates, manufactures steel frames
for double bunks—and triple bunks—in addition to license plates.

Less than a quarter mile from the old prison is the California State Prison at
Sacramento, known as "New Folsom," which houses about 3,000 Level 4 inmates.
They are the real hard cases: violent predators, gang members, prisoners unable
to "program" well at other facilities, unable to obey the rules. New Folsom
does not have granite walls. It has a "death-wire electrified fence," set
between two ordinary chain-link fences, that administers a lethal dose of 5,100
volts at the slightest touch. The architecture of New Folsom is stark and
futuristic. The buildings have smooth gray concrete façades, unadorned
except for narrow slits for cell windows. Approximately a third of the inmates
are serving life sentences; more than a thousand have committed at least one
murder, nearly 500 have committed armed robbery, and nearly 200 have committed
assault with a deadly weapon.

Inmates were placed in New Folsom while it was still under construction. The
prison was badly overcrowded even before it was finished, in 1987. It has at
times housed more than 300 inmates in its gymnasiums. New Folsom—like old
Folsom, and like the rest of the California prison system—now operates at
roughly double its intended capacity. Over the past twenty years the State of
California has built twenty-one new prisons, added thousands of cells to
existing facilities, and increased its inmate population eightfold. Nonviolent
offenders have been responsible for most of that increase. The number of drug
offenders imprisoned in the state today is more than twice the number of
inmates who were imprisoned for all crimes in 1978. California now has the
biggest prison system in the Western industrialized world, a system 40 percent
bigger than the Federal Bureau of Prisons. The state holds more inmates in its
jails and prisons than do France, Great Britain, Germany, Japan, Singapore, and
the Netherlands combined. The California Department of Corrections predicts
that at the current rate of expansion, barring a court order that forces a
release of prisoners, it will run out of room eighteen months from now. Simply
to remain at double capacity the state will need to open at least one new
prison a year, every year, for the foreseeable future.

Today the United States has approximately 1.8 million people behind bars: about
100,000 in federal custody, 1.1 million in state custody, and 600,000 in local
jails. Prisons hold inmates convicted of federal or state crimes; jails hold
people awaiting trial or serving short sentences. The United States now
imprisons more people than any other country in the world—perhaps half a
million more than Communist China. The American inmate population has grown so
large that it is difficult to comprehend: imagine the combined populations of
Atlanta, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Des Moines, and Miami behind bars. "We have
embarked on a great social experiment," says Marc Mauer, the author of the
upcoming book The Race to Incarcerate. "No other society in human
history has ever imprisoned so many of its own citizens for the purpose of
crime control." The prison boom in the United States is a recent phenomenon.
Throughout the first three quarters of this century the nation's incarceration
rate remained relatively stable, at about 110 prison inmates for every 100,000
people. In the mid-1970s the rate began to climb, doubling in the 1980s and
then again in the 1990s. The rate is now 445 per 100,000; among adult men it is
about 1,100 per 100,000. During the past two decades roughly a thousand new
prisons and jails have been built in the United States. Nevertheless, America's
prisons are more overcrowded now than when the building spree began, and the
inmate population continues to increase by 50,000 to 80,000 people a year.

The economist and legal scholar Michael K. Block, who believes that American
sentencing policies are still not harsh enough, offers a straightforward
explanation for why the United States has lately incarcerated so many people:
"There are too many prisoners because there are too many criminals committing
too many crimes." Indeed, the nation's prisons now hold about 150,000 armed
robbers, 125,000 murderers, and 100,000 sex offenders—enough violent criminals
to populate a medium-sized city such as Cincinnati. Few would dispute the need
to remove these people from society. The level of violent crime in the United
States, despite recent declines, still dwarfs that in Western Europe. But the
proportion of offenders being sent to prison each year for violent crimes has
actually fallen during the prison boom. In 1980 about half the people entering
state prison were violent offenders; in 1995 less than a third had been
convicted of a violent crime. The enormous increase in America's inmate
population can be explained in large part by the sentences given to people who
have committed nonviolent offenses. Crimes that in other countries would
usually lead to community service, fines, or drug treatment—or would not be
considered crimes at all—in the United States now lead to a prison term, by
far the most expensive form of punishment. "No matter what the question has
been in American criminal justice over the last generation," says Franklin E.
Zimring, the director of the Earl Warren Legal Institute, "prison has been the
answer."

On January 17, 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower used his farewell address
to issue a warning, as the United States continued its cold war with the Soviet
Union. "In the councils of government," Eisenhower said, "we must guard against
the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the
military-industrial complex." Eisenhower had grown concerned about this new
threat to democracy during the 1960 campaign, when fears of a "missile gap"
with the Soviet Union were whipped up by politicians, the press, and defense
contractors hoping for increased military spending. Eisenhower knew that no
missile gap existed and that fear of one might lead to a costly, unnecessary
response. "The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and
will persist," Eisenhower warned. "We should take nothing for granted."

Three decades after the war on crime began, the United States has developed a
prison-industrial complex—a set of bureaucratic, political, and economic
interests that encourage increased spending on imprisonment, regardless of the
actual need. The prison-industrial complex is not a conspiracy, guiding the
nation's criminal-justice policy behind closed doors. It is a confluence of
special interests that has given prison construction in the United States a
seemingly unstoppable momentum. It is composed of politicians, both liberal and
conservative, who have used the fear of crime to gain votes; impoverished rural
areas where prisons have become a cornerstone of economic development; private
companies that regard the roughly $35 billion spent each year on corrections
not as a burden on American taxpayers but as a lucrative market; and government
officials whose fiefdoms have expanded along with the inmate population. Since
1991 the rate of violent crime in the United States has fallen by about 20
percent, while the number of people in prison or jail has risen by 50 percent.
The prison boom has its own inexorable logic. Steven R. Donziger, a young
attorney who headed the National Criminal Justice Commission in 1996, explains
the thinking: "If crime is going up, then we need to build more prisons; and if
crime is going down, it's because we built more prisons—and building even more
prisons will therefore drive crime down even lower."

The raw material of the prison-industrial complex is its inmates: the poor, the
homeless, and the mentally ill; drug dealers, drug addicts, alcoholics, and a
wide assortment of violent sociopaths. About 70 percent of the prison inmates
in the United States are illiterate. Perhaps 200,000 of the country's inmates
suffer from a serious mental illness. A generation ago such people were handled
primarily by the mental-health, not the criminal-justice, system. Sixty to 80
percent of the American inmate population has a history of substance abuse.
Meanwhile, the number of drug-treatment slots in American prisons has declined
by more than half since 1993. Drug treatment is now available to just one in
ten of the inmates who need it. Among those arrested for violent crimes, the
proportion who are African-American men has changed little over the past twenty
years. Among those arrested for drug crimes, the proportion who are
African-American men has tripled. Although the prevalence of illegal drug use
among white men is approximately the same as that among black men, black men
are five times as likely to be arrested for a drug offense. As a result, about
half the inmates in the United States are African-American. One out of every
fourteen black men is now in prison or jail. One out of every four black men is
likely to be imprisoned at some point during his lifetime. The number of women
sentenced to a year or more of prison has grown twelvefold since 1970. Of the
80,000 women now imprisoned, about 70 percent are nonviolent offenders. About
75 percent have children.

The prison-industrial complex is not only a set of interest groups and
institutions. It is also a state of mind. The lure of big money is corrupting
the nation's criminal-justice system, replacing notions of public service with
a drive for higher profits. The eagerness of elected officials to pass
"tough-on-crime" legislation—combined with their unwillingness to disclose the
true costs of these laws—has encouraged all sorts of financial improprieties.
The inner workings of the prison-industrial complex can be observed in the
state of New York, where the prison boom started, transforming the economy of
an entire region; in Texas and Tennessee, where private prison companies have
thrived; and in California, where the correctional trends of the past two
decades have converged and reached extremes. In the realm of psychology a
complex is an overreaction to some perceived threat. Eisenhower no doubt had
that meaning in mind when, during his farewell address, he urged the nation to
resist "a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action
could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties."

Liberal Legacy

The origins of the prison-industrial complex can be dated to January of 1973.
Senator Barry Goldwater had used the fear of crime to attract white
middle-class voters a decade earlier, and Richard Nixon had revived the theme
during the 1968 presidential campaign, but little that was concrete emerged
from their demands for law and order. On the contrary, Congress voted
decisively in 1970 to eliminate almost all federal mandatory-minimum sentences
for drug offenders. Leading members of both political parties applauded the
move. Mainstream opinion considered drug addiction to be largely a
public-health problem, not an issue for the criminal courts. The Federal Bureau
of Prisons was preparing to close large penitentiaries in Georgia, Kansas, and
Washington. From 1963 to 1972 the number of inmates in California had declined
by more than a fourth, despite the state's growing population. The number of
inmates in New York had fallen to its lowest level since at least 1950. Prisons
were widely viewed as a barbaric and ineffective means of controlling deviant
behavior. Then, on January 3, 1973, Nelson Rockefeller, the governor of New
York, gave a State of the State address demanding that every illegal-drug
dealer be punished with a mandatory prison sentence of life without parole.

Rockefeller was a liberal Republican who for a dozen years had governed New
York with policies more closely resembling those of Franklin Delano Roosevelt
than those of Ronald Reagan. He had been booed at the 1964 Republican
Convention by conservative delegates; he still harbored grand political
ambitions; and President Nixon would be ineligible for a third term in 1976.
Rockefeller demonstrated his newfound commitment to law and order in 1971, when
he crushed the Attica prison uprising. By proposing the harshest drug laws in
the United States, he took the lead on an issue that would soon dominate the
nation's political agenda. In his State of the State address Rockefeller argued
not only that all drug dealers should be imprisoned for life but also that
plea-bargaining should be forbidden in such cases and that even juvenile
offenders should receive life sentences.

The Rockefeller drug laws, enacted a few months later by the state legislature,
were somewhat less draconian: the penalty for possessing four ounces of an
illegal drug, or for selling two ounces, was a mandatory prison term of fifteen
years to life. The legislation also included a provision that established a
mandatory prison sentence for many second felony convictions, regardless of the
crime or its circumstances. Rockefeller proudly declared that his state had
enacted "the toughest anti-drug program in the country." Other states
eventually followed New York's example, enacting strict mandatory-minimum
sentences for drug offenses. A liberal Democrat, Speaker of the House Tip
O'Neill, led the campaign to revive federal mandatory minimums, which were
incorporated in the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act. Nelson Rockefeller had set in
motion a profound shift in American sentencing policy, but he never had to deal
with the consequences. Nineteen months after the passage of his drug laws
Rockefeller became Vice President of the United States.

When Mario Cuomo was first elected governor of New York, in 1982, he confronted
some difficult choices. The state government was in a precarious fiscal
condition, the inmate population had more than doubled since the passage of the
Rockefeller drug laws, and the prison system had grown dangerously overcrowded.
A week after Cuomo took office, inmates rioted at Sing Sing, an aging prison in
Ossining. Cuomo was an old-fashioned liberal who opposed mandatory-minimum drug
sentences. But the national mood seemed to be calling for harsher drug laws,
not sympathy for drug addicts. President Reagan had just launched the War on
Drugs; it was an inauspicious moment to buck the tide.

Unable to repeal the Rockefeller drug laws, Cuomo decided to build more
prisons. The rhetoric of the drug war, however, was proving more popular than
the financial reality. In 1981 New York's voters had defeated a $500 million
bond issue for new prison construction. Cuomo searched for an alternate source
of financing, and decided to use the state's Urban Development Corporation to
build prisons. The corporation was a public agency that had been created in
1968 to build housing for the poor. Despite strong opposition from upstate
Republicans, among others, it had been legislated into existence on the day of
Martin Luther King Jr.'s funeral, to honor his legacy. The corporation was an
attractive means of financing prison construction for one simple reason: it had
the authority to issue state bonds without gaining approval from the voters.

Over the next twelve years Mario Cuomo added more prison beds in New York than
all the previous governors in the state's history combined. Their total cost,
including interest, would eventually reach about $7 billion. Cuomo's use of the
Urban Development Corporation drew criticism from both liberals and
conservatives. Robert Gangi, the head of the Correctional Association of New
York, argued that Cuomo was building altogether the wrong sort of housing for
the poor. The state comptroller, Edward V. Regan, a Republican, said that Cuomo
was defying the wishes of the electorate, which had voted not to spend money on
prisons, and that his financing scheme was costly and improper. Bonds issued by
the Urban Development Corporation carried a higher rate of interest than the
state's general-issue bonds.

Legally the state's new prisons were owned by the Urban Development Corporation
and leased to the Department of Corrections. In 1991, as New York struggled to
emerge from a recession, Governor Cuomo "sold" Attica prison to the corporation
for $200 million and used the money to fill gaps in the state budget. In order
to buy the prison, the corporation had to issue more bonds. The entire
transaction could eventually cost New York State about $700 million.

The New York prison boom was a source of embarrassment for Mario Cuomo. At
times he publicly called it "stupid," an immoral waste of scarce state monies,
an obligation forced on him by the dictates of the law. But it was also a
source of political capital. Cuomo strongly opposed the death penalty, and
building new prisons shielded him from Republican charges of being soft on
crime. In his 1987 State of the State address, having just been re-elected by a
landslide, Cuomo boasted of having put nearly 10,000 "dangerous felons" behind
bars. The inmate population of New York's prisons had indeed grown by roughly
that number during his first term in office. But the proportion of offenders
being incarcerated for violent crimes had fallen from 63 percent to 52 percent
during those four years. In 1987 New York State sent almost a thousand fewer
violent offenders to prison than it had in 1983. Despite having the "toughest
anti-drug program" and one of the fastest-growing inmate populations in the
nation, New York was hit hard by the crack epidemic of the 1980s and the
violent crime that accompanied it. From 1983 to 1990 the state's inmate
population almost doubled—and yet during that same period the violent-crime
rate rose 24 percent. Between the passage of the Rockefeller drug laws and the
time Cuomo left office, in January of 1995, New York's inmate population
increased almost fivefold. And the state's prison system was more overcrowded
than it had been when the prison boom began.

By using an unorthodox means of financing prison construction, Mario
Cuomo turned the Urban Development Corporation into a rural development
corporation that invested billions of dollars in upstate New York. Although
roughly 80 percent of the state's inmates came from New York City and its
suburbs, high real-estate prices and opposition from community groups made it
difficult to build correctional facilities there. Cuomo needed somewhere to put
his new prisons; he formed a close working relationship with the state senator
Ronald B. Stafford, a conservative Republican whose rural, Adirondack district
included six counties extending from Lake George to the Canadian border. "Any
time there's an extra prison," a Cuomo appointee told
Newsdayin 1990, "Ron Stafford will take it."

Stafford had represented this district, known as the North Country, for more
than two decades. Orphaned as a child, he had been adopted by a family in the
upstate town of Dannemora. The main street of the town was dominated by the
massive stone wall around Clinton, a notorious maximum-security prison. His
adoptive father was a correctional officer at Clinton, and Stafford spent much
of his childhood within the prison's walls. He developed great respect for
correctional officers, and viewed their profession as an honorable one; he
believed that prisons could give his district a real economic boost. Towns in
the North Country soon competed with one another to attract new prisons. The
Republican Party controlled the state senate, and prison construction became
part of the political give and take with the Cuomo administration. Of the
twenty-nine correctional facilities authorized during the Cuomo years,
twenty-eight were built in upstate districts represented by Republican
senators.

When most people think of New York, they picture Manhattan. In fact, two thirds
of the state's counties are classified as rural. Perhaps no other region in the
United States has so wide a gulf between its urban and rural populations.
People in the North Country—which includes the Adirondack State Park, one of
the nation's largest wilderness areas—tend to be politically conservative,
taciturn, fond of the outdoors, and white. New York City and the North Country
have very little in common. One thing they do share, however, is a high rate of
poverty.

Twenty-five years ago the North Country had two prisons; now it has eighteen
correctional facilities, and a nineteenth is under construction. They run the
gamut from maximum-security prisons to drug-treatment centers and boot
camps. One of the first new facilities to open was Ray Brook, a federal prison
that occupies the former Olympic Village at Lake Placid. Other prisons have
opened in abandoned factories and sanatoriums. For the most part North Country
prisons are tucked away, hidden by trees, nearly invisible amid the vastness
and beauty of the Adirondacks. But they have brought profound change. Roughly
one out of every twenty people in the North Country is a prisoner. The town of
Dannemora now has more inmates than inhabitants.

The traditional anchors of the North Country economy—mining, logging, dairy
farms, and manufacturing—have been in decline for years. Tourism flourishes in
most towns during the summer months. According to Ram Chugh, the director of
the Rural Services Institute at the State University of New York at Potsdam,
the North Country's per capita income has long been about 40 percent lower than
the state's average per capita income. The prison boom has provided a huge
infusion of state money to an economically depressed region—one of the largest
direct investments the state has ever made there. In addition to the more than
$1.5 billion spent to build correctional facilities, the prisons now bring the
North Country about $425 million in annual payroll and operating expenditures.
That represents an annual subsidy to the region of more than $1,000 per person.
The economic impact of the prisons extends beyond the wages they pay and the
local services they buy. Prisons are labor-intensive institutions, offering
year-round employment. They are recession-proof, usually expanding in size
during hard times. And they are nonpolluting—an important consideration in
rural areas where other forms of development are often blocked by
environmentalists. Prisons have brought a stable, steady income to a region
long accustomed to a highly seasonal, uncertain economy.

Anne Mackinnon, who grew up in the North Country and wrote about its recent
emergence as New York's "Siberia" for Adirondack Life magazine, says the
prison boom has had an enormous effect on the local culture. Just about
everyone now seems to have at least one relative who works in corrections.
Prison jobs have slowed the exodus from small towns, by allowing young people
to remain in the area. The average salary of a correctional officer in New York
State is about $36,000—more than 50 percent higher than the typical salary in
the North Country. The job brings health benefits and a pension. Working as a
correctional officer is one of the few ways that men and women without college
degrees can enjoy a solid middle-class life there. Although prison jobs are
stressful and dangerous, they are viewed as a means of preserving local
communities. So many North Country residents have become correctional officers
over the past decade that those just starting out must work for years in
prisons downstate, patiently waiting for a job opening at one of the facilities
in the Adirondacks.

While many families in the north await the return of sons and daughters slowly
earning seniority downstate, families in New York City must endure the absence
of loved ones who seem to have been not just imprisoned for their crimes but
exiled as well. Every Friday night about 800 people, mostly women and children,
almost all of them African-American or Latino, gather at Columbus Circle, in
Manhattan, and board buses for the north. The buses leave through the night and
arrive in time for visiting hours on Saturday. Operation Prison Gap, which runs
the service, was founded by an ex-convict named Ray Simmons who had been
imprisoned upstate and knew how hard it was for the families of inmates to
arrange visits. When the company started, in 1973, it carried passengers in a
single van. Now it charters thirty-five buses and vans on a typical weekend and
a larger number on special occasions, such as Father's Day and Thanksgiving.
Ray Simmons's brother Tyrone, who heads the company, says that despite the
rising inmate population, ridership has fallen a bit over the past few years.
The inconvenience and expense of the long bus trips take their toll. One
customer, however, has for fifteen years faithfully visited her son in Comstock
every weekend. In 1996 she stopped appearing at Columbus Circle; her son had
been released. Six months later he was convicted of another violent crime and
sent back to the same prison. The woman, now in her seventies, still boards the
2:00 A.M. bus for Comstock every weekend. Simmons gives her a discount,
charging her $15—the same price she paid on her first trip, in 1983.

The Bare Hill Correctional Facility sits near the town of Malone, fifteen miles
south of the Canadian border. The Franklin Correctional Facility is a quarter
of a mile down the road, and the future site of a new maximum-security prison
is next door. Bare Hill is one of the "cookie cutter" medium-security prisons
that were built during the Cuomo administration. The state has built fourteen
other prisons exactly like it—a form of penal mass production that saves a
good deal of money. Most of the inmates at Bare Hill are housed in dormitories,
not cells. The dormitories were designed to hold about fifty inmates, each with
his own small cubicle and bunk. In 1990, two years after the prison opened,
double-bunking was introduced as a "temporary" measure to ease the overcrowding
in county jails, which were holding an overflow of state inmates. Eight years
later every dormitory at Bare Hill houses sixty inmates, a third of them
double-bunked. About 90 percent of the inmates come from New York City or one
of its suburbs, eight hours away; about 80 percent are African-American or
Latino. The low walls of the cubicles, which allow little privacy, are covered
with family photographs, pinups, religious postcards. Twenty-four hours a day a
correctional officer sits alone at a desk on a platform that overlooks the
dorm.

The superintendent of Bare Hill, Peter J. Lacy, is genial and gray-haired, tall
and dignified in his striped tie, flannels, and blue blazer. His office feels
light and cheery. Lacy began his career, in 1955, as a correctional officer at
Dannemora; he wore a uniform for twenty-five years, and in the 1980s headed a
special unit that handled prison emergencies and riots. He later served as an
assistant commissioner of the New York Department of Corrections. One of his
sons is now a lieutenant at a downstate prison. As Superintendent Lacy walks
through the prison grounds, he seems like a captain surveying his ship, rightly
proud of its upkeep, familiar with every detail. The lawns are neatly trimmed,
the buildings are well maintained, and the red-brick dorms would not seem out
of place on a college campus, except for the bars in the windows. There is
nothing oppressive about the physical appearance of Bare Hill, about the ball
fields with pine trees in the background, about the brightly colored murals and
rustic stencils on the walls, about the classrooms where instructors teach
inmates how to read, how to write, how to draw a blueprint, how to lay bricks,
how to obtain a Social Security card, how to deal with their anger. For many
inmates Bare Hill is the neatest, cleanest, most well-ordered place they will
ever live. As Lacy passes a group of inmates leaving their dorms for class, the
inmates nod their heads in acknowledgment, and a few of them say, "Hello, sir."
And every so often a young inmate gives Lacy a look filled with a hatred so
pure and so palpable that it would burn Bare Hill to the ground, if only it
could.

Big Business

The black-and-white photograph shows an inmate leaning out of a prison cell,
scowling at the camera, his face partially hidden in the shadows. "HOW HE GOT
IN IS YOUR BUSINESS," the ad copy begins. "HOW HE GETS OUT IS OURS." The photo
is on the cover of a glossy brochure promoting AT&T's prison telephone
service, which is called The Authority. BellSouth has a similar service, called
MAX, advertised with a photo of a heavy steel chain dangling from a telephone
receiver in place of a cord. The ad promises "long distance service that lets
inmates go only so far." Although the phone companies rely on clever copy in
their ads, providing telephone service to prisons and jails has become a
serious, highly profitable business. The nearly two million inmates in the
United States are ideal customers: phone calls are one of their few links to
the outside world; most of their calls must be made collect; and they are in no
position to switch long-distance carriers. A pay phone at a prison can generate
as much as $15,000 a year—about five times the revenue of a typical pay phone
on the street. It is estimated that inmate calls generate a billion dollars or
more in revenues each year. The business has become so lucrative that MCI
installed its inmate phone service, Maximum Security, throughout the California
prison system at no charge. As part of the deal it also offered the California
Department of Corrections a 32 percent share of all the revenues from inmates'
phone calls. MCI Maximum Security adds a $3.00 surcharge to every call. When
free enterprise intersects with a captive market, abuses are bound to occur.
MCI Maximum Security and North American Intelecom have both been caught
overcharging for calls made by inmates; in one state MCI was adding an
additional minute to every call.

Since 1980 spending on corrections at the local, state, and federal levels has
increased about fivefold. What was once a niche business for a handful of
companies has become a multibillion-dollar industry with its own trade shows
and conventions, its own Web sites, mail-order catalogues, and direct-marketing
campaigns. The prison-industrial complex now includes some of the nation's
largest architecture and construction firms, Wall Street investment banks that
handle prison bond issues and invest in private prisons, plumbing-supply
companies, food-service companies, health-care companies, companies that sell
everything from bullet-resistant security cameras to padded cells available in
a "vast color selection." A directory called the Corrections Yellow Pages lists
more than a thousand vendors. Among the items now being advertised for sale: a
"violent prisoner chair," a sadomasochist's fantasy of belts and shackles
attached to a metal frame, with special accessories for juveniles; B.O.S.S., a
"body-orifice security scanner," essentially a metal detector that an inmate
must sit on; and a diverse line of razor wire, with trade names such as Maze,
Supermaze, Detainer Hook Barb, and Silent Swordsman Barbed Tape.

As the prison industry has grown, it has assumed many of the attributes long
associated with the defense industry. The line between the public interest and
private interests has blurred. In much the same way that retired admirals and
generals have long found employment with defense contractors, correctional
officials are now leaving the public sector for jobs with firms that supply the
prison industry. These career opportunities did not exist a generation ago.
Fundamental choices about public safety, employee training, and the denial of
personal freedoms are increasingly being made with an eye to the bottom line.

One clear sign that corrections has become a big business as well as a form of
government service is the emergence of a trade newspaper devoted to the latest
trends in the prison and jail marketplace. Correctional Building News
has become the Variety of the prison world, widely read by
correctional officials, investors, and companies with something to sell. Eli
Gage, its publisher, founded the paper in 1994, after searching for a
high-growth industry not yet served by its own trade journal. Gage is neither a
cheerleader for the industry nor an outspoken critic. He believes that despite
recent declines in violent crime, national spending on corrections will
continue to grow at an annual rate of five to 10 percent. The number of young
people in the prime demographic for committing crimes, ages fifteen to
twenty-four, is about to increase; and the demand for new juvenile-detention
centers is already rising. Correctional Building News runs ads by the
leading companies that build prisons (Turner Construction, CRSS, Brown &
Root) and the leading firms that design them (DMJM, the DLR Group, and KMD
Architects). It features a product of the month, a facility of the month, and a
section titled "People in the News." An advertisement in a recent issue
promoted electrified fences with the line "Don't Touch!"

Private prison companies are the most obvious, the most controversial,
and the fastest-growing segment of the prison-industrial complex. The idea of
private prisons was greeted with enthusiasm during the Reagan and Bush
Administrations; it fit perfectly with a belief in small government and the
privatization of public services. The Clinton Administration, however, has done
far more than its Republican predecessors to legitimize private prisons. It has
encouraged the Justice Department to place illegal aliens and minimum-security
inmates in private correctional facilities, as part of a drive to reduce the
federal work force. The rationale for private prisons is that government
monopolies such as old-fashioned departments of corrections are inherently
wasteful and inefficient, and the private sector, through competition for
contracts, can provide much better service at a much lower cost. The
privatization of prisons is often described as a "win-win" outcome. A
private-prison company generally operates a facility for a government agency,
or builds and operates its own facility. The nation's private prisons accepted
their first inmates in the mid-1980s. Today at least twenty-seven states make
use of private prisons, and approximately 90,000 inmates are being held in
prisons run for profit.

The living conditions in many of the nation's private prisons are
unquestionably superior to conditions in many state-run facilities. At least
forty-five state prison systems are now operating at or above their intended
capacity. In twenty-two states prisons are operating under court-ordered
population caps. In fifteen states prison conditions are being monitored by the
courts. Life in the aging, overcrowded prisons operated by many state agencies
is dangerous and degrading. Most of the 34,000 state inmates currently being
held in the nation's jails for lack of available prison cells live in
conditions that are even worse. Private prisons tend to be brand-new, rarely
overcrowded, and less likely to house violent offenders. Moreover, some private
prisons offer programs, such as drug treatment and vocational training, that a
number of state systems have cut back. And yet something inherent in the idea
of private prisons seems to invite abuse.

The economics of the private-prison industry are in many respects similar to
those of the lodging industry. An inmate at a private prison is like a guest at
a hotel—a guest whose bill is being paid and whose check-out date is set by
someone else. A hotel has a strong economic incentive to book every available
room and encourage every guest to stay as long as possible. A private prison
has exactly the same incentive. The labor costs constitute the bulk of
operating costs for both kinds of accommodation. The higher the occupancy rate,
the higher the profit margin. Although it might seem unlikely that a private
prison would ever try to keep an inmate longer than was necessary for justice
to be served, New York State's experience with the "fee system" during the
nineteenth century suggests that the temptation to do so is hard to resist.
Under the fee system local sheriffs charged inmates for their stay in jail. A
1902 report by the Correctional Association of New York harshly criticized this
system, warning that judges might be inclined to "sentence a man to jail where
he may be a source of revenue to a friendly sheriff." Whenever the fee system
was abolished in a New York county, the inmate population dropped—by as much
as half. Last year a Prudential Securities report on private prisons described
some of the potential risks for the industry: a falling crime rate, shorter
prison sentences, a move toward alternative sentences, and changes in the
nation's drug laws. Nonetheless, the report concluded that "the industry
appears to have excellent prospects."

Private-prison companies can often build prisons faster and at lower cost than
state agencies, owing to fewer bureaucratic delays and less red tape. And new
prisons tend to be much less expensive to operate than the old prisons still
used in many states. But most of the savings that private-prison companies
offer are derived from the use of nonunion workers. Labor represents 60 to 80
percent of the operating costs at a prison. Although private-prison companies
are now moving into northern states and even signing agreements with some labor
unions, the overwhelming majority of private-prison cells are in southern and
southwestern states hostile to unions. Correctional officers in these private
prisons usually earn lower wages than officers employed by state governments,
while receiving fewer benefits and no pension. Some private-prison companies
offer their uniformed staff stock options as a retirement plan; the long-term
value of the stock is uncertain. The sort of cost-cutting imposed on
correctional officers does not extend to managers and administrators. They
usually earn much more than their counterparts in the public sector—a fact
that greatly increases the potential for conflicts of interest and official
corruption.

Last AST year a videotape of beatings at a private correctional facility in Texas
provoked a great deal of controversy. The tape showed correctional officers at
the Brazoria County Detention Center kicking inmates who were lying on the
floor, shooting inmates with a stun gun, and ordering a police dog to attack
them. The inmates had been convicted of crimes in Missouri, but were occupying
rented cells in rural Texas. One of the correctional officers in the video had
previously lost his job at a Texas state prison and served time on federal
charges for beating an inmate. The Brazoria County videotape received
nationwide publicity and prompted Missouri to cancel its contract with Capital
Correctional Resources, the private company operating the facility. But the
beatings were unusual only because they were captured on tape. Incidents far
more violent and surreal have become almost commonplace in the private prisons
of Texas.

The private-prison system in Texas arose in response to the violence and
disarray of the state system. In 1980 conditions in Texas state prisons were so
bad that the federal judge William Wayne Justice ruled that they amounted to
"cruel and unusual punishment." He appointed a special overseer for the prison
system and ordered the state to provide at least forty square feet of living
space for each inmate. By the mid-1980s, however, conditions had grown even
worse: Texas prisons were more overcrowded; gang wars between inmates resulted
in dozens of murders; and local jails were so crammed with the overflow of
state inmates that a number of counties later sued the state for relief. In
1986 Judge Justice threatened the state with a fine of $800,000 a day unless it
came up with a plan to ease the overcrowding in its prisons. While the Texas
legislature scrambled to add new prison beds to the system, entrepreneurs
sensed that profits could be made from housing state inmates in private
facilities. Developers cut deals with sheriffs in impoverished rural counties,
providing the capital to build brand-new jails, offering to run them, and
promising to share the profits. Privately run correctional facilities sprang up
throughout rural Texas, much the way oil rigs were once raised by wildcatters.
The founders of one large private-prison developer, N-Group Securities, had
previously sold condominiums and run a Houston disco. One critic quoted by the
Houston Chronicle called the speculative new enterprises "Joe's Bar and
Grill and Prisons."

The private-prison building spree in Texas—backed by investors such as
Allstate, Merrill Lynch, Shearson Lehman, and American Express—soon faced an
unanticipated problem. The State of Texas, under the auspices of a liberal
Democratic governor, Ann Richards, began to carry out an ambitious
prison-construction plan of its own in 1991, employing inmate labor and adding
almost 100,000 new beds in just a few years. In effect the state flooded the
market. Private firms turned to "bed brokers" for help, hoping to recruit
prisoners from out of state. By the mid-1990s thousands of inmates from across
the United States were being transported from overcrowded prison systems to
"rent-a-cell" facilities in small Texas towns. The distances involved in this
huge migration at times made it reminiscent of the eighteenth-century transport
schemes that shipped British convicts and debtors to Australia. In 1996 the
Newton County Correctional Center, in Newton, Texas, operated by a company
called the Bobby Ross Group, became the State of Hawaii's third largest
prison.

The private-prison industry usually charges its customers a daily rate for each
inmate; the success or failure of a private prison is determined by the number
of "man-days" it can generate. In a typical rent-a-cell arrangement a state
with a surplus of inmates will contact a well-established bed broker, such as
Dominion Management, of Edmond, Oklahoma. The broker will search for a facility
with empty beds at the right price. The cost per man-day can range from $25 to
$60, depending on the kind of facility and its level of occupancy. The more
crowded a private prison becomes, the less it charges for each additional
inmate. Facilities with individual cells are more expensive than those with
dormitories. Bed brokers earn a commission of $2.50 to $5.50 per man-day,
depending on how tight the market for prison cells is at the time. The
county—which does not operate the prison but simply gives it legal
status—sometimes gets a fee of as much as $1.50 a night for each prisoner.
When every bed is filled, the private-prison company, the bed broker, and the
county can do quite well.

The interstate commerce in prisoners, like many new industries, developed
without much government regulation. In 1996 the State of Texas encountered a
number of unexpected legal problems. Its private prisons were housing roughly
5,000 inmates from fourteen states. In August of that year two Oregon sex
offenders escaped from a Houston facility operated by the Corrections
Corporation of America. The facility normally held illegal aliens, under
contract to the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Faced with empty beds,
CCA had imported 240 sex offenders from Oregon. Texas officials had no idea
that violent offenders from another state were being housed in this
minimum-security facility. The escaped prisoners were eventually
recaptured—but they could not be prosecuted for escaping, because running away
from a private prison was not a violation of any Texas state law. The following
month a riot erupted at the Frio Detention Center, a private facility operated
by the Dove Development Corporation, which housed about 300 inmates from Utah
and Missouri. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice had to send thirty of
its officers in riot gear to regain control of the prison. A month later two
Utah prisoners, one of them a convicted murderer, escaped from the same
facility. A manhunt by state authorities failed to recapture them. Six other
Utah inmates had previously escaped from facilities run by Dove Development;
three were murderers. Last year the Texas legislature passed a bill that made
it illegal for an offender from any state to escape from a private prison and
that held the owners of such facilities responsible for any public expense
stemming from riots or escapes. Few other states have even attempted to pass
legislation dealing with these issues.

The private companies that now transport thousands of inmates across the United
States every day face even less government oversight than private-prison
companies. Indeed, federal regulations concerning the interstate shipment of
cattle are much stricter than those concerning the interstate shipment of
prisoners. Sheriff's deputies and U.S. marshals have traditionally been used to
pick up inmates in one state and deliver them to another. During the late 1980s
private companies began to offer the same service for about half the cost. The
firms saved money by employing nonunion guards and making multiple pickups and
deliveries on each trip. Prisoners today may spend as long as a month on the
road, visiting dozens of states, sitting for days in the backs of old station
wagons and vans, locked up alongside defendants awaiting trial and offenders on
their way to prison. Driving one of these transport vehicles is a dangerous
job, one that combines the stresses encountered by correctional officers with
those of long-distance truckers. Moreover, prisoners tend to view their days in
transit as an excellent time to attempt an escape. The turnover rate among the
transport guards and drivers is high; the pay is relatively low; and training
for the job rarely lasts more than a week. As a result, violent criminals are
frequently shipped from state to state in the custody of people who are ill
equipped to deal with them. Local authorities often don't learn that inmates
are passing through their towns until something goes wrong.

In August of 1996 Rick Carter and Sue Smith, the husband-and-wife operators of
R and S Prisoner Transport, were taking five murderers and a rapist from Iowa
to New Mexico. At a public rest stop in the Texas Panhandle one of the convicts
assaulted Carter on the way to the men's room. The others overpowered his wife
and seized the van. Carter and Smith, who had set off unarmed, were taken
hostage. A passing motorist dialed 911, and the six inmates were recaptured by
Texas police officers after a chase. On July 30 of last year Dennis Patrick
Glick—a convicted rapist, sentenced to two life terms, who was being
transported from Utah to Arkansas—commandeered a van owned by the Federal
Extradition Agency, a private company. One of the guards had fallen asleep, and
Glick borrowed his gun. Glick took the guard and seven other inmates hostage in
Ordway, Colorado; abandoned the van; took a local rancher hostage; stole two
more vehicles and a horse; eluded sixty law-enforcement officers through the
night; and was captured the next morning on horseback. In December of last year
Homer D. Land, a prisoner being transported from Kansas to Florida, escaped
from a van operated by TransCor America. The van had stopped at a Burger King
in Owatonna, Minnesota. While one guard went inside and bought eleven
hamburgers, the other guard (who had been a TransCor America employee for less
than a month) opened the van's back doors for ventilation, enabling Land and
two other inmates to get away. Land took a married couple hostage and spent the
night at their house in Owatonna before being recaptured in Chicago. The same
TransCor America van had been commandeered four days earlier by Whatley
Roylene, a prisoner traveling from New Mexico to Massachusetts and facing
charges of murder and armed robbery. At a gas station in Sterling, Colorado,
Roylene grabbed a shotgun from a sleeping guard. Officers from the Colorado
state police and the local sheriff's department surrounded the van; the
standoff ended, according to a local official, when other prisoners persuaded
Roylene to hand over the gun.

The Bobby Ross Group, based in Austin, Texas, has proved to be one of the more
troubled private-prison companies. The company's founder, Bobby Ross, was a
sheriff in Texas and a successful bed broker before starting his own business,
in 1993. He eventually set up operations at seven Texas facilities and one
Georgia facility, signing contracts to accept inmates from states including
Colorado, Hawaii, Montana, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Virginia. It did not take
long for problems to begin. In January of 1996 nearly 500 Colorado inmates,
many of them sex offenders, were transferred to a Bobby Ross facility in Karnes
County, Texas; two later escaped, and a full day passed before state
authorities were notified. At the Bobby Ross prison in Dickens County, Texas,
fights broke out between inmates from Montana and Hawaii that spring. A few
months later a protest about the poor quality of food and medical care turned
into a riot, and the warden ordered guards to shoot live rounds. The warden was
replaced.

Montana canceled its contract with the Bobby Ross Group in September of last
year. Three Montana inmates had escaped, and one had been killed by an inmate
from Hawaii. Montana investigators found that many of the inmates at the
Dickens County prison were going hungry and waiting days to see a doctor. "We
really dislike losing a customer," an attorney representing Bobby Ross said to
a reporter. In October an inspector for the Texas Commission on Jail Standards
gave the Dickens County prison the highest possible ratings. A month later the
same inspector acknowledged that in addition to his official duties he worked
as a "consultant" for the Bobby Ross Group, which paid him $42,000 a year. In
December eleven inmates from Hawaii escaped from their dormitory at the Newton
County facility operated by Bobby Ross, released nearly 300 other inmates, and
set fire to one of the buildings. In February of this year inmates rioted again
at Newton and set fire to the prison commissary. In brighter days, before the
riots and fires, Bobby Ross had explained the usefulness of employing William
Sessions, the former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as a
"special adviser" to the company. "He goes with us on sales calls to potential
clients," Ross told a reporter for the Colorado paper Westword. "That
kind of thing."

The U.S. Corrections Corporation, for years the nation's third largest
private-prison company, has encountered legal difficulties even more serious
than those of the Bobby Ross Group. In 1993 an investigation by the Louisville
Courier-Journal discovered that the company was using unpaid prison
labor in Kentucky. Inmates were being forced to perform a variety of jobs,
including construction work on nine small buildings at the Lee County prison;
construction work on one church and renovation work on three others attended by
company employees; renovation work on a company employee's game-room business;
painting and maintenance at a country club; and painting at a private school
attended by a prison warden's daughter. The Courier-Journal concluded
that "U.S. Corrections has repeatedly profited financially from its misuse of
inmate labor." Although the state Department of Corrections confirmed these
findings, it took no action against the company. A year later J. Clifford Todd,
the chairman of U.S. Corrections, pleaded guilty to a federal charge of mail
fraud, admitting that he had paid a total of roughly $200,000 to a county
correctional official in Kentucky. In return for monthly payments, which for
four years were laundered through a California company, the official sent
inmates to U.S. Corrections. Todd cooperated fully with an FBI investigation,
but later became embittered when a federal judge denied his request for a term
of house arrest. The head of the nation's third largest private-prison company
was sentenced to fifteen months in a federal prison.

The nation's second largest private-prison company, Wackenhut Corrections, has
operated with a far greater degree of professionalism and discretion. Its
parent company, the Wackenhut Corporation, has for many years worked closely
with the federal government, performing various sensitive tasks such as
guarding nuclear-weapons facilities and overseas embassies. Indeed, the company
has long been accused of operating as a front for the Central Intelligence
Agency—an accusation that its founder, George Wackenhut, has vehemently
denied. In the early 1950s Wackenhut quit the FBI, at the age of thirty-four,
and formed a private-security company with three other former FBI agents. He
went on to assemble the nation's largest private collection of files on alleged
"subversives," with dossiers on at least three million Americans. During the
1970s the Wackenhut Corporation diversified into strike-breaking and
anti-terrorism. The company, headquartered in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, has
branch offices in forty-two states and in more than fifty foreign countries.
Its annual revenues exceed $1 billion. George Wackenhut remains the chairman of
the company, but the day-to-day operations are handled by his son, Richard.
Over the years Wackenhut's board of directors has read like a Who's Who of
national security, including a former head of the FBI, a former head of the
Defense Intelligence Agency, a former CIA director, a former CIA deputy
director, a former head of the Secret Service, a former head of the Marine
Corps, and a former Attorney General. After the company decided to enter the
private-prison industry, it hired Norman Carlson, who had headed the Federal
Bureau of Prisons.

Last year Wackenhut Corrections became the first private company ever hired by
the Federal Bureau of Prisons to manage a large facility. The federal
government's long-standing relationship with Wackenhut has developed an odd
equilibrium: one wields the power while the other reaps the financial rewards.
Kathleen Hawk Sawyer, the current director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, is
responsible for the supervision of about 115,000 inmates, including drug lords,
international terrorists, and organized-crime leaders. Her salary last year was
$125,900. George C. Zoley, the chief executive officer of Wackenhut
Corrections, is responsible for the supervision of about 25,000 state and
federal inmates, mostly illegal aliens, low-level drug offenders, petty
thieves, and parole violators. His salary last year was $366,000—plus a bonus
of $122,500, plus a stock-option grant of 20,000 shares. At least half a dozen
other executives at Wackenhut Corrections were paid more last year than the
head of the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

The Corrections Corporation of America is the nation's largest private-prison
company; it recently participated in a buyout of the U.S. Corrections
Corporation, thereby obtaining several thousand additional inmates. CCA was
founded in 1983 by Thomas W. Beasley and Doctor R. Crants, Nashville
businessmen with little previous experience in corrections. Beasley, a former
chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party, later told Inc. magazine his
strategy for promoting the concept of private prisons: "You just sell it like
you were selling cars, or real estate, or hamburgers." Beasley and Crants
recruited a former director of the Virginia Department of Corrections to help
run the company. In 1984 CCA accepted its first Texas inmates, before it had a
completed facility in that state. The inmates were housed in rented motel
rooms; a number of them pushed the air-conditioning units out of the wall and
escaped. A year later Beasley approached his good friend Lamar Alexander, the
governor of Tennessee, with an extraordinary proposal: CCA would buy the
state's entire prison system for $250 million. Alexander supported the idea,
saying, "We don't need to be afraid in America of people who want to make a
profit." His wife, Honey, and the speaker of the Tennessee House, Ned
McWherter, were among CCA's early investors; between them the two had owned 1.5
percent of CCA's stock; they sold their shares to avoid any perceived conflict
of interest. Nevertheless, the CCA plan was blocked by the Democratic majority
in the legislature.

CCA expanded nationwide over the next decade, winning contracts to house more
than 40,000 inmates and assembling the sixth largest prison system in the
United States; but it never lost the desire to take over all the prisons in
Tennessee. In order to achieve that goal, CCA executives established personal
and financial links with figures in both political parties. During the spring
of last year CCA's allies in the Tennessee legislature began once again to push
for privatization. Crants said that letting CCA run the prisons would save the
state up to $100 million a year; he did not specify how these dramatic savings
would be achieved. George Zoley, the head of Wackenhut Corrections, argued that
handing over the Tennessee prison system to a single company would simply turn
a state monopoly into a private one. Wackenhut employed the law firm of the
former U.S. senator Howard Baker to lobby on its behalf, seeking a piece of the
action.

By February of this year a compromise of sorts had emerged in Tennessee. New
legislation proposed shifting as much as 70 percent of the state's inmate
population to the private sector; CCA and Wackenhut would both get a chance to
bid for prison contracts. The new privatization bill seemed a sure thing. It
was never put before the legislature for a vote, however. On April 20 CCA
announced plans for a corporate restructuring so complex in its details that
many Wall Street analysts began to wonder about the company's financial health.
The price of CCA stock—which in recent years had been one of the nation's top
performers—began to plummet, declining in value by 25 percent over the next
several days. At the annual CCA shareholders meeting, last May, Crants compared
Wall Street investors to "wildebeests" stampeding out of fear, and blamed the
stock's plunge on a single broker who had sold 640,000 shares.

Crants neglected to tell CCA shareholders a crucial bit of information: he
himself had sold 200,000 shares of CCA stock just weeks before the announcement
that sent its value tumbling. By selling his stock on March 2, Crants had
avoided a loss of more than $2.5 million. When asked recently to explain his
CCA financial dealings, Crants declined to comment. The timing and the size of
that stock transaction are likely to be of interest to the attorneys who have
filed more than half a dozen lawsuits on behalf of CCA shareholders.

Although conservatives have long worried about the loss of American sovereignty
to international agencies such as the United Nations and the World Bank, the
globalization of private-prison companies has thus far eluded criticism. A
British private-prison company, Securicor, operates two facilities in Florida.
Wackenhut Corrections is now under contract to operate Doncaster prison, in
England; three prisons in Australia; and a prison in Scotland. It is actively
seeking prison contracts in South Africa. CCA has received a good deal of
publicity lately, but few of the articles about it have mentioned that the
largest shareholder of America's largest private-prison company is Sodexho
Alliance—a food-service conglomerate whose corporate headquarters are in
Paris.

About 200 inmates were in the A yard at New Folsom when I visited not
long ago. They were playing soft-ball and handball, sitting on rocks,
standing in small groups, smoking, laughing, jogging around the perimeter.
Three unarmed correctional officers casually kept an eye on things, like
elementary school teachers during recess. The yard was about 300 feet long and
250 feet wide, with more dirt than grass, and it was hot, baking hot. The heat
of the sun bounced off the gray concrete walls enclosing the yard. "These are
the sensitive guys," a correctional officer told me, describing the men in
Facility A. Most of them had killed, raped, committed armed robberies, or
misbehaved at other prisons, but now they were trying to stay out of trouble.
Some were former gang members; some were lifers because of a third strike; some
were getting too old for prison violence; some were in protective custody
because of their celebrity, their snitching, or their previous occupation. A
few of the inmates on the yard were former police officers. As word spread that
I was a journalist, groups of inmates followed me and politely approached,
eager to talk. Lieutenant Billy Mayfield, New Folsom's press officer,
graciously kept his distance, allowing the prisoners to speak freely.

"I shouldn't be here" was a phrase I heard often, followed by an impassioned
story about the unfairness of the system. I asked each inmate how many of the
other men in the yard deserved to be locked up in this prison, and the usual
response was "These guys? Man, you wouldn't believe some of these guys; at
least two thirds of them should be here." Behind the need to blame others for
their predicament and the refusal to accept responsibility, behind all the
denial, lay an enormous anger, one that seemed far more intense than the
typical inmate complaints about the food or the behavior of certain officers.
Shirtless, sweating, unshaven, covered in tattoos, one inmate after another
described the rage that was growing inside New Folsom. The weights had been
taken away; no more conjugal visits for inmates who lacked a parole date; not
enough help for the inmates who were crazy, really crazy; not enough drug
treatment, when the place was full of junkies; not enough to do—a list of
grievances magnified by the overcrowding into something that felt volatile,
ready to go off with the slightest spark. As I stood in the yard hearing the
anger of the sensitive guys, the inmates in Facility C were locked in their
cells, because of a gang-related stabbing the previous week, and the inmates in
Facility B were being shot with pepper spray to break up a fight.

The acting warden at New Folsom when I visited, a woman named Suzan Hubbard,
began her career as a correctional officer at San Quentin nineteen years ago.
Although she has a degree in social work from the University of California at
Berkeley, Hubbard says that her real education took place at the "college of
San Quentin." She spent a decade at the prison during one of its most violent
and turbulent periods. In her years on the job two fellow staff members were
murdered. Hubbard learned how to develop a firm but fair relationship with
inmates, some of whom were on death row. She found that contrary to some
expectations, women were well suited for work in a maximum-security prison.
Communication skills were extremely important in such a charged environment;
inmates often felt less threatened by women, less likely to engage in a clash
of egos. Hubbard was the deputy warden at New Folsom on September 27, 1996,
when fights broke out in the B yard. At nine o'clock in the morning she was
standing beside her car in the prison parking lot, and she heard three shots
being fired somewhere inside New Folsom. Everyone in the parking lot froze,
waiting for the sound of more gunfire. After more shots were fired, Hubbard
hurried into the prison, made her way to the B yard, and found it in chaos.

A group of Latino gang members had launched an attack on a group of
African-American gang members, catching them by surprise and stabbing them with
homemade weapons. The fighting soon spread to the other inmates in the exercise
yard, who divided along racial lines. As many as 200 inmates were involved in
the riot. Correctional officers instructed everyone in the yard to get down;
they fired warning shots, rubber bullets, and then live rounds. When Hubbard
arrived at the yard, about a hundred inmates had dropped to the ground and
another hundred were still fighting. The captain in charge of the unit stood
among a group of inmates, telling them, "Sit down, get down, we'll take care of
this." Hubbard and the other officers circulated in the yard, calling prisoners
by name, telling them to get down. It took thirty minutes to quell the riot.
Twelve correctional officers were injured while trying to separate combatants.
Six inmates were stabbed, and five were shot. Victor Hugo Flores, an inmate
serving an eighteen-year sentence for voluntary manslaughter and attempted
murder, was killed by gunfire.

Hubbard finds working in the California penal system to be stressful but highly
rewarding. She tries to defuse tensions by talking and listening to the inmates
on the yards. She and her officers routinely place themselves at great risk.
Last year 2,583 staff members were assaulted by inmates in California.
Thousands of the inmates are HIV-positive; thousands more carry hepatitis C.
Officers have lately become the target of a new form of assault by inmates,
known as gassing. Being "gassed" means being struck by a cup or bag containing
feces and urine. The California prison system, especially its Level 4
facilities, is full of warring gangs—members of the Crips, the Bloods, the
Fresno Bulldogs, the Aryan Brotherhood, the Nazi Lowriders, the Mexican Mafia,
and the Black Guerrilla Family, to name a few. In addition to the organized
violence, there are random acts of violence. On June 15 of last year a
correctional officer was attacked by an inmate in the infirmary at New Folsom.
The officer, Linda Lowery, was savagely beaten and kicked, receiving severe
head wounds. Her attacker was serving a four-year sentence for assaulting an
officer.

California's correctional officers are not always the victims when violence
occurs behind bars; in recent months they have been linked to several widely
publicized acts of brutality. At Pelican Bay State Prison at least one officer
conspired with inmates to arrange assaults on convicted child molesters. At
Corcoran State Prison officers allegedly staged "gladiator days," in which
rival gang members were encouraged to fight, staff members placed bets on the
outcome, and matches often ended with inmates being shot. As the FBI
investigates alleged abuses at Corcoran and allegations of an official
cover-up, correctional officers are feeling misrepresented and unfairly
maligned by the media—only adding to the tension in California's prisons.

The level of violence in the California penal system is actually lower today
than it was a decade ago. But the rate of assaults among inmates has gradually
climbed since its low point, in 1991. Studies have linked double-bunking and
prison overcrowding with higher rates of stress-induced mental disorders,
higher rates of aggression, and higher rates of violence. In the state's Level
4 prisons almost every cell is now double-bunked. The fact that more bloodshed
has not occurred is a testament to the high-tech design of the new prisons and
the skills of their officers. Nevertheless, Cal Terhune, the director of the
California Department of Corrections, worries about how much more stress the
system can bear, and about how long it can go without another riot. "We're
sitting on a very volatile situation," Terhune says. "Every time the phone
rings here, I wonder ..."

Thirty years ago California was renowned for the liberalism of its
criminal-justice system. In 1968 an inmate bill of rights was signed into law
by Ronald Reagan, then the governor of California. More than any other state,
California was dedicated to the rehabilitative ideal, to the belief that a
prison could take a criminal and "cure" him, set him on the right path.
California's prisons were notable for their many educational and vocational
programs and their group-therapy sessions. In those days every state in the
country had a system of indeterminate prison sentences. The legislature set the
maximum sentence for a crime, and judges and parole boards tried to make the
punishment fit the individual. California's system was the most indeterminate:
the sentence for a given offense might be anything from probation to life. The
broad range of potential sentences gave enormous power to the parole board,
known as the Adult Authority; a prisoner's release depended on its evaluation
of how well his "treatment" was proceeding. One person might serve ten months
and another person ten years for the same crime.

Although indeterminate sentencing had many flaws, one of its virtues was that
it gave the state a means of controlling the size of the prison population. If
prisons grew too full, the parole board could release inmates who no longer
seemed to pose a threat to public safety. Governor Reagan used the Adult
Authority to reduce the size of California's inmate population, giving
thousands of prisoners an early release and closing one of the state's prisons.
By the mid-1970s, however, the Adult Authority had come under attack from an
unusual coalition of liberals, prisoners, and conservative advocates of law and
order. Liberals thought that the Adult Authority discriminated against
minorities, making them serve longer sentences. Prisoners thought that it was
unfair; after all, they were still in prison. Conservatives thought that it was
too soft, allowing too many criminals back on the street too soon. And no one
put much faith in the rehabilitative effects of prison. In 1971 seventeen
inmates and seven staff members were killed in California prisons. The
following year thirty-five inmates and one staff member were killed.

California was one of the first states in the nation to get rid of
indeterminate sentencing. The state's new law required inmates to serve the
sentence handed down by the judge, with an allowance for "good time," which
might reduce a prison term by half. The law also amended the section of the
state's penal code that declared the ultimate goals of imprisonment: the word
"rehabilitation" was replaced by the word "punishment." In 1976 the bill was
endorsed and signed into law by a liberal Democrat, Governor Jerry Brown.

As liberalism gave way to demands for law and order, California judges began to
send a larger proportion of convicted felons to prison and to give longer
sentences. The inmate population started to grow. Sentencing decisions made at
the county level, by local prosecutors and judges, soon had a major impact on
the state budget, which covered the costs of incarceration. Tax cuts mandated
by Proposition 13 meant that county governments were strapped for funds and
could not maintain local jails properly or pay for community-based programs
that administered alternative sentences. Offenders who might once have been
sent to a local jail or a halfway house were now sent to a state prison.
California's criminal-justice system slowly but surely spun out of control. The
state legislature passed hundreds of bills that required tough new sentences,
but did not adequately provide for their funding. Judges sent people to prison
without giving any thought to where the state would house them. And the
Department of Corrections was left to handle the flood of new inmates, unable
to choose how many it would accept or how many it would let go.

In 1977 the inmate population of California was 19,600. Today it is 159,000.
After spending $5.2 billion on prison construction over the past fifteen years,
California now has not only the largest but also the most overcrowded prison
system in the United States. The state Department of Corrections estimates that
it will need to spend an additional $6.1 billion on prisons over the next
decade just to maintain the current level of overcrowding. And the state's
jails are even more overcrowded than its prisons. In 1996 more than 325,000
inmates were released early from California jails in order to make room for
offenders arrested for more-serious crimes. According to a report this year by
the state's Little Hoover Commission, in many counties offenders who are
convicted of a crime and given sentences of less than ninety days will not even
be sent to jail. The state's backlog of arrest warrants now stands at about 2.6
million — the number of arrests that have not been made, the report says,
largely because there's no room in the jails. According to one official
estimate, counties will need to spend $2.4 billion over the next ten years to
build more jails — again, simply to maintain the current level of
overcrowding.

The extraordinary demand for new prison and jail cells in California has
diverted funds from other segments of the criminal-justice system, creating a
vicious circle. The failure to spend enough on relatively inexpensive
sanctions, such as drug treatment and probation, has forced the state to
increase spending on prisons. Only a fifth of the felony convictions in
California now lead to a prison sentence. The remaining four fifths are usually
punished with a jail sentence, a term of probation, or both. But the jails have
no room, and the huge caseloads maintained by most probation officers often
render probation meaningless. An ideal caseload is about twenty-five to fifty
offenders; some probation officers in California today have a caseload of 3,000
offenders. More than half the state's offenders on probation will most likely
serve their entire term without ever meeting or even speaking with a probation
officer. Indeed, the only obligation many offenders on probation must now
fulfill is mailing a postcard that gives their home address.

California parole officers, too, are overwhelmed by their caseloads. The
state's inmate population is not only enormous but constantly changing. Last
year California sent about 140,000 people to prison — and released about
132,000. On average, inmates spend two and a half years behind bars, and then
serve a term of one to three years on parole. During the 1970s each parole
agent handled about forty-five parolees; today each agent handles about twice
that number. The money that the state has saved by not hiring enough new parole
agents is insignificant compared with the expense of sending parole violators
back to prison.

About half the California prisoners released on parole are illiterate. About 85
percent are substance abusers. Under the terms of their parole, they are
subjected to periodic drug tests. But they are rarely offered any opportunity
to get drug treatment. Of the approximately 130,000 substance abusers in
California's prisons, only 3,000 are receiving treatment behind bars. Only
8,000 are enrolled in any kind of pre-release program to help them cope with
life on the outside. Violent offenders, who need such programs most of all, are
usually ineligible for them. Roughly 124,000 inmates are simply released from
prison each year in California, given nothing more than $200 and a bus ticket
back to the county where they were convicted. At least 1,200 inmates every year
go from a secure housing unit at a Level 4 prison — an isolation unit, designed
to hold the most violent and dangerous inmates in the system — right onto the
street. One day these predatory inmates are locked in their cells for
twenty-three hours at a time and fed all their meals through a slot in the
door, and the next day they're out of prison, riding a bus home.

Almost two thirds of the people sent to prison in California last year were
parole violators. Of the roughly 80,000 parole violators returned to prison,
about 60,000 had committed a technical violation, such as failing a drug test;
about 15,000 had committed a property or a drug crime; and about 3,000 had
committed a violent crime, frequently a robbery to buy drugs. The gigantic
prison system that California has built at such great expense has essentially
become a revolving door for poor, highly dysfunctional, and often illiterate
drug abusers. They go in, they get out, they get sent back, and every year
there are more. The typical offender being sent to prison in California today
has five prior felony convictions.

The California legislature has not authorized a new bond issue for prison
construction since 1992, deadlocked over the cost. Meanwhile, the state's
"Three Strikes, You're Out" law has been steadily filling prison cells with
long-term inmates. Don Novey, the head of the California Correctional Peace
Officers Association (CCPOA), helped to gain passage of the law. He now worries
that if California's prison system becomes much more overcrowded, a federal
judge may order a large-scale release of inmates. Novey has proposed keeping
some nonviolent offenders out of prison, allowing judges to give them suspended
sentences and a term of probation instead. He has also advocated a way to save
money while expanding the penal system:build "mega-prisons." California already
builds and operates the biggest prisons in the United States. A number of
California prisons now hold more than 6,000 inmates — about sixtimes the
nationwide average. The mega-prisons proposed by the CCPOA would house up to
20,000 inmates. A few new mega-prisons, Novey says, could satisfy California's
demand for new cells into the next century.

Correctional officials see prison overcrowding as grounds for worry about
potential riots, bloodshed, and court orders; others see opportunity. "It has
become clear over the past several months," Doctor R. Crants said earlier this
year, "that California is one of the most promising markets CCA has, with a
burgeoning need for secure, cost-effective prison beds at all levels of
government." In order to get a foothold in that market, CCA announced it would
build three prisons in California entirely on spec — that is, without any
contract to fill them. "If you build it in the right place," a CCA executive
told The Wall Street Journal, "the prisoners will come." Crants boasted
to the Tennessean that California's private-prison industry will be
dominated by "CCA alone." Executives at Wackenhut Corrections think otherwise.
Wackenhut already houses almost 2,000 of California's minimum-security inmates
at facilities in the state. The legislature has recently adopted plans to house
an additional 2,000 minimum-security inmates in private prisons. Wackenhut and
CCA have opened offices in Sacramento and hired expensive lobbyists. The CCPOA
vows to fight hard against the private-prison companies and their anti-union
tactics. "They can build whatever prisons they want," Don Novey says. "But the
hell if they're going to run them." One of the new CCA prisons is rising in the
Mojave Desert outside California City, at a cost of about $100 million. The
company is gambling that cheap, empty prison beds will prove irresistible to
California lawmakers. The new CCA facility promises to be a boon to California
City once the inmates start arriving. The town has been hit hard by layoffs at
Edwards Air Force Base, which is nearby. Mayor Larry Adams, asked why he wanted
a prison, said, "We're a desperate city."

Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America is one
of the most famous books ever written about the politics and
culture of the United States. The original purpose of Tocqueville's 1831
journey to this country is less well known. He came to tour its prisons on
behalf of the French government. The United States at the time was renowned in
Europe for having created a whole new social institution: the penitentiary. In
New York and Pennsylvania prisons were being designed not to punish inmates but
to reform them. Solitary confinement, silence, and hard work were imposed in
order to encourage spiritual and moral change. At some penitentiaries officials
placed hoods over the heads of newcomers to isolate them from other inmates.
After visiting American prisons Tocqueville and his traveling companion,
Gustave de Beaumont, wrote that social reformers in the United States had been
swept up in "the monomania of the penitentiary system," convinced that prisons
were "a remedy for all the evils of society."

The historian David J. Rothman, author of The Discovery of the Asylum
(1971), has noted one of the ironies of America's early-nineteenth-century
fondness for prisons. The idea of the penitentiary took hold at the height of
Jacksonian democracy, when freedom and the spirit of the common man were being
widely celebrated. "At the very moment that Americans began to pride themselves
on the openness of their society, when the boundless frontier became the symbol
of opportunity and equality," Rothman observes, "notions of total isolation,
unquestioned obedience, and severe discipline became the hallmarks of the
captive society." More than a century and a half later political rhetoric about
small government and the virtues of the free market is being accompanied by an
eagerness to deny others their freedom. The hoods now placed on inmates in the
isolation units at maximum-security prisons are not intended to rehabilitate.
They are designed to protect correctional officers from being bitten or spat
upon.

The standard justification for today's prisons is that they prevent crime. The
rate of violent crime in the United States has indeed been declining since
1991. The political scientist James Q. Wilson, among many others, believes that
the recent rise in the nation's incarceration rate has been directly
responsible for the decrease in violent crime. Although the validity of the
theory seems obvious (murderers and rapists who are behind bars can no longer
kill and rape ordinary citizens), it is difficult to prove. Michael Tonry, a
professor of law and public policy at the University of Minnesota, is an expert
on international sentencing policies and an advocate of alternative punishments
for nonviolent offenders. He acknowledges that the imprisonment of almost two
million Americans has prevented some crimes from being committed. "You could
choose another two million Americans at random and lock them up," Tonry says,
"and that would reduce the number of crimes too." But demographics and larger
cultural trends may be responsible for most of the decline in violent crime.
Over the past decade Canada's incarceration rate has risen only slightly.
Nevertheless, the rate of violent crime in Canada has been falling since 1991.
Last year the homicide rate fell by nine percent. The Canadian murder rate has
now reached its lowest level since 1969.

Christopher Stone, the head of New York's Vera Institute of Justice, believes
that prisons can be "factories for crime." The average inmate in the United
States spends only two years in prison. What happens during that time behind
bars may affect how he or she will behave upon release. The lesson being taught
in most American prisons—where violence, extortion, and rape have long been
routine—is that the strong will always rule the weak. Inmates who display the
slightest hint of vulnerability quickly become prey. During the 1950s and 1960s
prison gangs were formed in California and Illinois as a means of
self-protection. Those gangs have now spread nationwide. The Mexican Mafia and
the Aryan Brotherhood have gained power in Texas prisons. The Gangsta Killer
Bloods and the Sex Money Murder Bloods have emerged in New York prisons.
America's prisons now serve as networking and recruiting centers for gang
members. The differences between street gangs and prison gangs have become less
distinct. The leaders of prison gangs increasingly direct illegal activity both
inside and outside. A 1996 investigation by the Chicago Tribune found that
gangs had gained extraordinary control over the state prisons in Illinois:
formal classes at the Stateville prison law library had taught the history and
rules of the Maniac Latin Disciples; a leader of the Gangster Disciples had at
various times kept cellular phones, a color television, a stereo, a Nintendo
Game Boy, a portable washing machine, and up to a hundred pounds of marijuana
in his cell. Many of the customs, slang, and tattoos long associated with
prison gangs have become fashionable among young people. In cities throughout
America, the culture of the prisons is rapidly becoming the culture of the
streets.

The spirit of every age is manifest in its public works, in the great
construction projects that leave an enduring mark on the landscape. During the
early years of this century the Panama Canal became President Theodore
Roosevelt's legacy, a physical expression of his imperial yearnings. The New
Deal faith in government activism left behind huge dams and bridges, post
offices decorated with murals, power lines that finally brought electricity to
rural America. The interstate highway system fulfilled dreams of the Eisenhower
era, spreading suburbia far and wide; urban housing projects for the poor were
later built in the hopes of creating a Great Society.

"The era of big government is over," President Bill Clinton declared in
1996—an assertion that has proved false in at least one respect. A recent
issue of "Construction Report," a monthly newsletter published by
Correctional Building News, provides details of the nation's latest
public works: a 3,100-bed jail in Harris County, Texas; a 500-bed
medium-security prison in Redgranite, Wisconsin; a 130-bed minimum-security
facility in Oakland County, Michigan; two 200-bed housing pods at the Fort
Dodge Correctional Facility, in Iowa; a 350-bed juvenile correctional facility
in Pendleton, Indiana; and dozens more. The newsletter includes the telephone
numbers of project managers, so that prison-supply companies can call and make
bids. All across the country new cellblocks rise. And every one of them, every
brand-new prison, becomes another lasting monument, concrete and ringed with
deadly razor wire, to the fear and greed and political cowardice that now
pervade American society.

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Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Most of the big names in futurism are men. What does that mean for the direction we’re all headed?

In the future, everyone’s going to have a robot assistant. That’s the story, at least. And as part of that long-running narrative, Facebook just launched its virtual assistant. They’re calling it Moneypenny—the secretary from the James Bond Films. Which means the symbol of our march forward, once again, ends up being a nod back. In this case, Moneypenny is a send-up to an age when Bond’s womanizing was a symbol of manliness and many women were, no matter what they wanted to be doing, secretaries.

Why can’t people imagine a future without falling into the sexist past? Why does the road ahead keep leading us back to a place that looks like the Tomorrowland of the 1950s? Well, when it comes to Moneypenny, here’s a relevant datapoint: More than two thirds of Facebook employees are men. That’s a ratio reflected among another key group: futurists.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today.

— Deuteronomy 15: 12–15

Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation.

Even when they’re adopted, the children of the wealthy grow up to be just as well-off as their parents.

Lately, it seems that every new study about social mobility further corrodes the story Americans tell themselves about meritocracy; each one provides more evidence that comfortable lives are reserved for the winners of what sociologists call the birth lottery. But, recently, there have been suggestions that the birth lottery’s outcomes can be manipulated even after the fluttering ping-pong balls of inequality have been drawn.

What appears to matter—a lot—is environment, and that’s something that can be controlled. For example, one study out of Harvard found that moving poor families into better neighborhoods greatly increased the chances that children would escape poverty when they grew up.

While it’s well documentedthat the children of the wealthy tend to grow up to be wealthy, researchers are still at work on how and why that happens. Perhaps they grow up to be rich because they genetically inherit certain skills and preferences, such as a tendency to tuck away money into savings. Or perhaps it’s mostly because wealthier parents invest more in their children’s education and help them get well-paid jobs. Is it more nature, or more nurture?

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.